Infrastructure as a service cloud computing environments manage and provision virtual machines for multiple, independent users to access locally or remotely. The abundance of users and the evolving nature of anomalous software have led to concerns over the security and integrity of such computing environments.
Trusted environments (i.e., environments where user access to physical hardware is known, the hardware vendors are known, the guest virtual machines are known, etc.) provide fewer challenges to implementing known security measures. However, such known security measures are less successful in untrusted environments due to a high level of uncertainty pertaining to the physical access of hardware by the hosting party, the hardware itself, and information reflecting the interactions between the virtual machines and the host machine. There is a need for successful security and integrity measures to be implemented in untrusted environments.